David Vitter fights for formaldehyde

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Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has been raising objections with the EPA on behalf of the formaldehyde industry.
Reuters

Several public health experts interviewed by ProPublica think the industry’s goal is to delay the assessment as long as possible and to undermine the credibility of EPA’s chemical risk-assessment program.

“This gives the appearance of another congressman being more interested in industry than the health of the public,” said Peter Infante, a former director of the Office of Carcinogen Identification and Classification at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “The public should not think that because a government document is undergoing NAS review, that that review is going to be competent.”

EPA’s chemical risk assessments are crucial to protecting the public’s health because they are the government’s most comprehensive analysis of the dangers the chemicals present and are used as the scientific foundation for state and federal regulations. But it usually takes years or even decades to get an assessment done or to revise one that is outdated. Often, the industry spends millions on lobbying and scientific studies that counter the government’s conclusions.

Congress stalled the formaldehyde reassessment once before. In 2004, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) persuaded EPA to delay it, even though preliminary findings from a National Cancer Institute study had already linked formaldehyde to leukemia. Inhofe insisted that EPA wait for a more “robust set of findings” from the Institute.

The findings that Inhofe asked for weren’t released until five years later — in May 2009 — and they reinforced the 2004 findings. Of the nearly 25,000 workers the National Cancer Institute had tracked for 30 years, those exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had a 37 percent greater risk of death from blood and lymphatic cancers and a 78 percent greater risk of leukemia than those exposed to lower amounts.

The Formaldehyde Council immediately released a statement disputing those findings and calling for a full review by the National Academy of Sciences. But this time it wasn’t Inhofe who stepped in on the industry’s behalf, but Vitter, who, like Inhofe, sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee.

On the day the study came out, Charles Grizzle, one of the Formaldehyde Council’s Washington lobbyists and a former EPA assistant administrator, donated $2,400 to Vitter’s reelection campaign, the maximum an individual may give to a federal candidate in a single election cycle. Grizzle didn’t respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment for this story.

Vitter began his push for an NAS review of formaldehyde in a June 29 letter to EPA. It included a list of questions about the formaldehyde assessment and urged EPA to ask the National Academy to weigh in on it, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

EPA responded on July 8, defending its plan to have the assessment reviewed by its own external peer review panel, the Scientific Advisory Board. The letter noted that the advisory board could do the review in 12 months to 16 months for about $200,000, while the average National Academy review takes 18 to 24 months and costs $800,000 to $1 million.

In September, two more major scientific reviews raised concerns about the dangers of formaldehyde. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a division of the World Health Organization, concluded it had enough evidence to show that formaldehyde exposure can cause leukemia. And the National Toxicology Program changed its categorization of formaldehyde from “reasonably anticipated to be a carcinogen” to “known carcinogen.”

The effects of formaldehyde are not an abstract problem in Louisiana, where thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims claim they suffered respiratory problems after being housed in government trailers contaminated with the chemical.

Vitter is spitting in the face of constituents. Lets pour a bottle of formaldehyde into Vitter's diapers and see what happens.

Vitter is a man of unquestionable integrity, seeking only the scientific truth concerning the link between formaldehyde and cancer. NOT! Vitter is like the women he rents, a prostitute willing to do whatever nasty thing the highest bidder wants him to do. Will tea partiers join other voters in rising up and throwing the bum out of office? Inquiring minds want to know.

I feel like I am taking crazy pills, I remember growing up in the 80's when the EPA was somewhat toothless. Over the last few years the EPA has become gumless. I am not a huge fan of government regulation, but how can this even be a discussion? Does anyone think this chemical is safe, unless you want to preserve a dead specimen in a jar? Didn't people get sick by the hundreds after Katrina in FEMA trailers? I don't know, I suppose self preservation in politics trumps all else.

So formaldehyde, which they use to preserve dead things, has the potential to kill people. LOL. The EPA is on to something. CO2, which plants need to live, is a known risk (for who)? What in the hell do these idiots at the EPA think they are proving? Can't wait for them to try and regulate methane, which comes out of people...

Current theories of cancer focus on sequential mutations as a cause of the disease. Formaldehyde reacts chemically with DNA and is thus a very possible mutagen (something that causes mutations). It is also volatile and thus easily enters the body via the airway and lungs. How Vitter could work on behalf of industry rather than protect his constituents is despicable. Surely there are ways to serve both economic and human concerns. He should find them.

In addition to using valuable farmland unecessarily, requiring more energy to produce than it is worth, costing tens of billions in taxes to support and causing poorer gas mileage; ethanol also creates formaldehyde as a by-product endangering people who live near the factories that produce it.

In order to greatly curtail the emission of this potential carcinogen these plants should be shut down. They serve no useful purposes for ethanol and biofuels except as pork for the farm lobby. It would be a good start to shut them down. It would not require the EPA or even legislation except to stop the subsidies. Democrats still control both houses of congress and the presidency and have not proposed any legislation to identify this chemical as dangerous, instead in a gigantic leap of idiocracy they declare life giving carbon dioxide a pollutant. Liberals quick to blame republicans suffer from responsibility amnesia and party specific outrage.